The Beginning and End of Life 409 



id nature of natural death our author leaves as mysterious 

 he found them. We are certainly far from professing 

 be able to explain death. Indeed we strongly suspect 

 lat it must remain inexplicable till life, its opposite, can 

 accounted for and explained. In our eyes death can 

 mly be a consequence of something which causes a natural 

 jvival of a dead organism to be impossible. But what can 

 that something be ? Here Professor J. S. Burdon Sanderson 

 comes very appositely to our assistance. The luminous and 

 highly suggestive remarks he has recently made in his 

 address to the Biological Section of the British Association 

 (at Newcastle) should be carefully read and maturely 

 pondered over by all those who are interested in that 

 at once most familiar and most obscure of all subjects of 

 investigation — life. 



Adopting as a fundamental principle the constant correla- 

 tion between function and structure — of the form and organi- 

 sation of parts with the active processes they perform — he 

 proceeds to show how microscopic observations have been 

 altogether outrun by physiological investigations, so that 

 structural conditions have to be imagined, which are alto- 

 gether unverifiable by sight, however much it can as yet be 

 aided by art. In considering the ultimate lessons to be 

 derived from the subject he selected for exposition. Professor 

 Burdon Sanderson, in concluding his address, uses the follow- 

 ing pregnant words : — 



' The word Life is used in physiology in what, if you like, may be 

 called a technical sense, and denotes only that state of change with 

 jjermanence which I have endeavoured to set forth to you. In this 

 restricted sense of the word, therefore, the question, "What is 

 Life^' is one to which the answer is approachable; but I need not 

 say that in a higher sense — higher because it appeals to higher 

 faculties in our nature — the word suggests something outside 

 mechanism, which may perchance be its cause rather than its effect. 



* The tendency to recognise such a relation as this is what we 



